This is Steven Salzberg's blog on genomics, pseudoscience, medical breakthroughs, higher education, and other topics, including skepticism about unscientific medical practices. Here's where I can say what I really think about abuses and distortions of science, wherever I see them.

Measles is on the rise in Europe, driven by "vaccine gaps" which in turn are due to misinformation about the benefits of vaccines. Vaccines are possibly the single greatest contribution to human health in the past century. Literally millions of people are alive today who would not be, thanks to vaccines.

And yet: vaccine rates have dropped in recent years in multiple countries. In March, the BBC reported that measles had become endemic (meaning that it is self-sustaining, continuing to spread within the country) in France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Romania, Switzerland and Ukraine. The worst measles outbreak is in Romania, which reported over 3,400 cases and 17 deaths in just the first 3 months of this year.

Now measles is spreading in Germany, which is scrambling to contain it. Germany had 504 cases through mid-April, versus just 33 cases for the same period last year. At least one person, a young mother of three children, has died. The primary reason for the spread of the disease, as reported by the German news outlet RT, is unvaccinated individuals, and the reason their numbers are growing is simple: the anti-vaccine movement.

Vaccination is safe and remarkably effective, but the anti-vax movement is furiously trying to convince parents not to vaccinate. Their latest gambit is "Vaxxed," a conspiracy-mongering anti-vaccine screen produced by Andrew Wakefield, the notorious ex-doctor who published a fraudulent (and later retracted) study claiming that MMR vaccines caused autism. Nearly 20 years later, despite Wakefield losing his medical license because of his "elaborate fraud," he continues to push his debunked claims.

"We are trying to save a child's life, we put it on a helicopter, it flies to Starship Hospital. The kidneys are failing, its heart's failing, its lungs are failing. All because we didn't put a bloody $7.50 meningococcal vaccine into that child's thigh."